 Hola, mis amigos. Me llamo Robert Reeves. Soy de Tejas. That explains my accent. I said hello, my friends. I'm Robert Reeves. I'm from Texas. That explains my accent. Lo siento. So today we're going to be talking about a new initiative that we're doing at Linux Foundation. And I've got some really exciting partners that I wanted to share with you. But first, I figured we're in Europe, so I need to tell a story about Lego. Remember, it's Lego and not Legos. And so I got a 12-year-old boy, Rex, and when he was 10, a couple years ago, my mother, his grandmother, Nanny, sends him a package from Amazon and here are some Legos. And he builds it. It's like, hey, Dad, check this out. Cool. And I said, look, take a picture of it with you and send it to Nanny. And he said, no, I'm, no, I'll take a picture of the Legos, the kid. And I was like, dude, Nanny doesn't care about that. She wants to see you building something. She wants to see appreciation. She wants to see cool stuff that happened. And wait until you see what happens after you send that to her. Two days later, he gets a ton more Lego. All right? I'm going somewhere with this. Point is, is that I think recently, you know, recent history, Linux Foundation has been the beneficiary of a lot of goodwill and donations and discounts from our partners. We haven't been really good about sharing the love, about showing the cool stuff that we're doing with this and elevating the message from our partners, the cool stuff they're doing, with us, the cool stuff we're doing with their technology. And so what we're trying to do is two things. One, we're trying to help, well, we're trying to delight developers. That's always going to be number one. But we also want to delight our partners. It's imperative that we take care of both. And when we do that, well, everybody's happy. All right? The developers, the partner, Linux Foundation, our members, very, we're all satisfied at that point. So what we're trying to do here, the strategy is, is to work with our partners, to elevate the story, and we're going to be talking about that, each story for our six Lighthouse partners, but talk about all the cool stuff that we're doing with them. So let's talk about kind of our cadence here and always starts with developers. I believe that, look, you know, a former startup person had two companies, the last thing I was ever able to do at my companies was get developers to use the tools that I think they should use. That don't work. Or as we say in Texas, that dog will not hunt. And so what we need to do is we need to listen to our developers and see what they're using. And there's going to be an ask, and well, I'll ask you right now, for our members, please let us know things that you're seeing in foundations and projects that you pay attention to, that you're interested in, partners that are really helping out and doing cool stuff so that we can return the favor. We can take a picture, you know, of the kid with the Lego. When we're able to share these stories, our partners then in turn take them, into their marketing motion. They generate MQLs, marketing qualified leads, generate opportunities. This is close one business. That is a virtuous cycle. We are the Red Cross of software. We are not for profit at Linux Foundation, as you know. And what we are unable to pay in software costs and those sorts of things, we're able to make it up for them, for those partners, with measurable ROI. I think that's really important. So, let's talk about what is a strategic partner. Now, there's five dimensions here. Obviously, monetary. We really appreciate when people donate credits, software, deep discounts. That means a lot. We really appreciate it. But there's more to it than just that. We have, what was number two here? We've got technology. I mean, it has to work. It has to provide value. Remember, delight developers. We also want stuff that's used by a lot of people. We want to learn from others. We want to help educate others about this technology. Better together. We certainly want companies, partners that have a good brand. Obviously, if a company does not align with our values, the Linux Foundation, well, we're just not going to be able to do that. And then, finally, project and maintain our impact. At the end of the day, delight developers. Now, we don't want strategic partners to be number one in all these. This is fluid. I mean, this is several dimensions. And so, we've got partners that are small. We've got strategic partners that are large. And it's just really important that sometimes you just need that one specialized tool for a project, for a foundation. Other times, we want to use it across all projects, all foundations. But the most important thing is that our partners want something else. They want to get something out of this because, you know, that's how the best relationships work. Everybody benefits. Everybody wins. Now, real talk time. You know, look, budgets are tightening. And I think what our partners are seeking is a better understanding of the with them. What's in it for me? What are they getting out of this relationship? It can't just be about the transaction. It can't just be about the cash. Those kind of relationships never last. And I think it's on Linux Foundation to really identify, you know, what we're getting out of it. And we'll, you know, show you some examples of that in a bit. But, you know, in the past, we've had a really great track record of having qualitative benefit for our partners. But a logo up. Invite them to a party. I think it's time for us to continue to do that, but also shift into quantitative. If we are delivering case studies, if we are helping our partners write these case studies, providing them the content, tell this story, then that feeds into their existing marketing motion. They can blast this out. They can tell the world about all the great things that Linux Foundation is doing with their solution. I think that is the key that we have to do. And that's, frankly, has been a challenge for us and we're correcting that now. Also, you know, just because we have the technology doesn't mean, oh, everything's great. We need to work with our partners to help onboard, make it really easy for developers to use it. I mean, look, they're pretty smart. They're open source developers. But we can do things to kind of lessen that learning curve and help them out. So that's kind of the real talk slide. It's, you know, the sunshine side, you know, what everybody gets out of this, what we could possibly do. And I think we have got proven recently that the case studies that we're helping our partners write, providing this content, is delivering results. And that is great. I not only want to work with partners that are going to help us solve problems for our developers, projects, foundations, I also want to work with partners that want to get this story out and that want to share the results so that we can improve. That's how you get better. You know, I also think that there's an opportunity for us to provide us, our developers, our open source developers, best in the world to provide product feedback. I mean, who else are you going to listen to? I mean, these are the top. And so I think by having our partners work closely with those developers that are using their solution, understand challenges and fix them, that's awesome. Again, you know, it's really helping that partner, at the end of the day, generate revenue, get a better product, generate revenue. And then when we're able to, you know, they're able to work closer with our developers, they have existing enablement motion. They have customer success teams. They have documentation. And making sure that our open source developers have access to that stuff, really important. I don't want to, certainly, nobody wants to cause more burden for our partners. Okay, so I'm going to run through this, but hey, are you all ready to go to the Guggenheim? Because I've been dying all day. I really want to check that place out. I ran by it, you know, that's pretty cool. All right, sorry. Just trying to make sure everybody's still awake. So alphabetical order, I kind of want to walk through each of these partners. And again, these are lighthouse partners. These were the folks that said, you know what, we'll take a ride. We'll see where this goes. And Dan Simple has been a longtime partner of the Linux Foundation. You've used this in PCC, in LFX. When you're working with domains, the thousands and thousands of domains that LF foundations and projects manage, Dan Simple is handling that. The LFX team ties into their API and just makes it super easy to update. No, you know, opening tickets to update DNS. No, no, no. You can just do it from LFX. There we go. What this allows us, allows Linux Foundation to do is distribute domain name management across all the projects. We don't have to centralize it in one place, deal with time zone issues and all that stuff. We enable them to just handle it themselves. I think that's really cool. There's a case study about this. Of course, just check out sked, sked? How do we, sked? I don't know, sked.com. And the slides are attached. Our friends at Element, they have a chat solution that is based on Matrix, open source project. Have you all noticed that your Slack bill has gone up? Anybody notice that? I did. And so, you know, that's certainly challenging for some of our projects that are paying for Slack. And Linux Foundation is about choice. We're about providing choice that people can make decisions on their own what they want to use. If they want to use Slack, that's great. If they want to use our friends at Element, awesome. You want to use IRC, great. Tear it up. It's just really important that we provide choice to our projects, our foundations, and they can make the decision. For Element, LFIT had done a POC using Matrix, and they loved it. And the teams that were using Matrix, they chose that because they're open source purists. They don't want anything dealing with commercial software, and that's cool. That's about choice. And so they started using it. Well, LFIT said this is great. Really want somebody else to run this. And that's what Element does. And a big fan of them. They've got some really cool tech for migrations, and they've just been a joy to work with. Really like that gang. They're based out of Europe. And Equinix, we're halfway through gang. Equinix does bare metal cloud compute. They have been very, very generous with CNCF and Linux kernel. You can see the CNCF projects that are there, and they're just doing amazing stuff. The thing I wanted to just kind of double-click on is the work with kernel. Because at my last startup, that was the stuff that I realized how dependent we were on archive.kernel.org. We had some technology that would go into a Docker container, and it needed the kernel headers. So we'd see what kernel version is running in that Docker container, get the kernel headers, compile a module, and oh, our software would work. This is great. It just always worked. Now, if archive.kernel.org went down, we would go down. And how do you explain that to customers? There are so many companies. All of us are dependent on this. Certainly the Linux distributions on mirrors. But it was really fun listening to the CICD team at kernel, and this is their line, not mine. They said, you know, half the internet goes down without this stuff. And I was like, half the good internet? It's like, oh, yeah, the bad stuff stays up. But we've got a great case study there with their work with CNCF. Super team. Wonderful. Very generous. Our friends at Fossa, this is a great story because this is a long-term relationship that we're kind of highlighting and we're bringing out. Our friends at Fossa, they have been working, what is the year? 2016? When did CNCF start? 2015. So they were there early, early, early. A ton of projects use this. And, you know, they have been really gracious, very generous with us. I like the fact that Kubernetes and Prometheus are using it. If that isn't cool, I don't know what is. And they've got, we've got a case study here explaining, you know, why they've done this. This was an interview with Chris Anacheck, the CNCF CTO, talking about Fossa. And so this is the kind of cadence and relationship that we want to develop with our strategic partners. We want to certainly benefit. We want all of our projects and foundations to benefit from using these partners, but we also want to help them. Again, if you know of something, please let me know. Let us know. And here we've got Gitpod. And this is, this is near and dear to my heart as well. I'm wearing long sleeves, but you don't see my new tattoo, which is a keyboard. And it says, works on my machine. So I've been, they used to call it software configuration management. I'm like, oh gee dev ops. And when I started checking this stuff out, I was like, wow. All right, this would have saved me so much hassle and heartache. And they have an existing open source program where you just fill out a form, you get approved. Well, what they've said is that if you're an LF project, you automatically get approved. We're not going to review this or anything. If LF, any of the foundations in the Linux foundation have said, okay, you can come in, then great. You get to take advantage of it. They've already written documentation to make this super easy. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. This is pretty interesting because this was two weeks ago. They said, hey, we want to do this. And they moved really fast to help us out. Really appreciate that. And finally, last but not least, our friends at Kube cost. Did you all know that CNCF uses Kubernetes to run Kubernetes? It's like turtles all the way down. And so what they're working on is putting this Kubernetes infrastructure in all the clouds. Well, it's super valuable to the cloud provider because you don't have to get out, you know, data ingress, egress fees and all that expensive stuff. And so these cloud providers are being very generous to CNCF and donating credits to host this infrastructure so that Kubernetes runs great in their cloud, win-win-win. But we owe it to those cloud providers to be responsible stewards of their donations. It's just rude to, you know, somebody lets you borrow their car and you return it with an empty take-a-gas, dirty, no, no, fill it up, clean it. And that's what we're trying to do with Kube cost. They're helping us identify ways that we can control the credit spend that we make so that we can report back to our cloud provider friends, those strategic partners, and say, hey, we're being good stewards. Look at us. Full take-a-gas. Check it out. I'm hoping that that kind of cadence working with our partners also has our strategic partners helping each other out. That's what I ideally would like to see, that they start working together and say, oh, you're over? You're helping LF? You're helping CNCF? Great, so are we. So here's the ask. Would love to hear pointers, things that you've heard. If you've got a positive experience with a partner, maybe it's not a positive experience. I would love to hear that as well and help you resolve that. R2 at linuxfoundation.org. We have thanks to our wonderful marketing team at LF. They have released the partner page. Got it done on Friday when I was getting to the plane. They're awesome. So that's listed if you want to read more about it and get some more detail about these partners. And also, you know, being from Texas, I got a lot of these sayings, we dance with the dates that brought us. And speaking of dates, they're going to be joining us at these partners at the Guggenheim. Some of them are here. Thank you for coming. And if you would like to chat with them, you can introduce yourself or find me and I'm happy to do so. Gang, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So I think we got two more. So keep going, Gang. We're almost there. I'm proud of you.